While a weekend at your nearest resort might herald crowded slopes and long lift lines, a combination of snow, wind, and a firm grip will take you out of the melée into bigger, better backcountry action. And when you're harnessed onto a snowkite, you can cruise along with almost anything on your feet, from powder skis to a snowboard, a bobsled to the bottom of a shovel.

Explorers like Matty McNair, who led the first all-women's trip to the North Pole in 1997, have been using kites and skis to speed across open stretches of the frozen Arctic for years. "On a good day, we can kite for eight to 12 hours," says McNair, whose family kiteskied across the Greenland ice cap in 2003. This October, she and her children plan to ski to the South Pole and kiteski back; she estimates that the return trip will take half the time of the trip out.

But kiting on snow doesn't have to mean a full-blown expedition. Snowkites can help riders execute extreme drops over cliffs, rocket over roads, and speed across open plains of backyard snow. And instead of riding a chairlift to the top, snowkiters can use the wind to power them up a mountain—telemark skier and kiting pioneer Ken Lucas made it all the way up Mount Hood under kite power.

Winter kiting isn't the exclusive realm of mountain zones, either. "If we've got a good snow dump, anything from Nebraska to Michigan opens up," says Brian Schenck, sales director for Salt Lake City's Windzup snowkite maker and distributor. Everything from frozen lakes to snow-covered soccer fields are fair game. Using snow-specific kites—uninflatable models called parafoils or open-cell foils—beginner kiters can get the hang of the sport on the first day, while skilled snowkiters can get huge, vertigo-inducing air.
Pioneer: Guillaume Chastagnol

Twenty-nine-year-old Frenchman Guillaume Chastagnol, the first world champion snowkiter, still gets choked up when he sees new terrain. On a road trip last winter between Colorado and Wyoming, he and two friends spotted a giant snowpark. He was so excited, he says, that he wanted to stop every two minutes. When the crew reached a huge, snow-covered dune, "We were crying," he recalls, "it's just too beautiful."

Chasta, as he's called by his team at Ozone kites, is no stranger to snow. He started skiing as a two-year-old at Les Deux Alpes in France, where the northern and southern Alps meet up. In the 1990s, he was a hard-core snowboarder, representing France at the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics (he finished fifth in the half-pipe competition) and jetting to the States for two top-ten finishes in the Winter X Games.

Everything for Chasta seems to be larger than life, from his 90-second, 100-meter cliff jumps to his favorite place to ride, Norway: "It's too big, you've got to take your GPS." And that's the way he wants it. The resorts were just getting too crowded, and for Chasta the kite was a way to tap into the empty space. "You don't need a lift ticket or to wait for half an hour on the chairlift and get cold." Instead, he's getting airborne with the aid of his kite, which he uses to soar 150 feet into the air and pull swirling kite loops before touching down.

Chasta's winter home base is Serre Chevalier in the southeastern French Alps, on the border with Italy and only a hop from Torino. In the summers, he switches to the liquid stuff off his home on Tahiti. While his life seems perfect, it sounds like he'd be ready to give it all up for time on that perfect snowfield. During his winter trek to the States, Chasta says of the discovery of that pristine winter-kiting zone: "I was thinking, 'If paradise is like that, let's go now.'"